I don't usually talk about my health here because I have the good fortune of being a generally healthy person. This July has had other ideas.
Around July 3, I started feeling tightness in my upper abdomen and upper belly, along with being unusually tired. It continued through the weekend, and by Monday I was so uncomfortable that I called a triage nurse and got in to see a doctor. My labs showed elevated lipase and a high white blood cell count, and we were concerned about inflammation in the abdomen (including possible pancreas involvement).
On Tuesday, after reviewing the labs drawn on Monday, the doctor recommended I go to the ER for a CT scan. At Sharp Hospital, I was evaluated and had imaging and additional tests done. The ER team diagnosed acute pancreatitis along with acute dehydration, and I was admitted to the hospital for treatment.
On Wednesday and Thursday I continued recovering in the hospital. By late Thursday, July 9th, I was able to eat about half a sandwich without trouble, and I was released. No prescriptions to take home—just a low-fat diet which I've been following closely and feel much better. Next stop is a visit to a Gastroenterologist tomorrow to see what other follow-up is needed.
July wasn't done with me yet.
On Saturday (July 18), we were out running errands for about 1.5 hours for groceries and Costco, and we got home around 2pm. We headed to church later that evening, and around 5:30pm I suddenly started feeling hot and sweaty while standing. On my way out to get some air, I experienced tunnel vision and ended up feeling faint.
I sat down hard on the cement and scraped my right knee and inside of my right wrist. My wife and a doctor how saw me leave the church went outside and found me unconscious—I was probably out for 1–2 minutes, and they revived me right there. They checked my pulse and called an ambulance.
The ambulance arrived quickly. They checked my blood sugar, ran orientation-type checks, and then took me to Sharp Memorial (two ER visits in one month!). On the way, they gave IV fluids and Zofran for nausea. At the ER, EKG and lab tests came back okay, so I was discharged. This incident was deemed unrelated to my Pancreatitis. Personally, I think this comes down to diet and hydration management but I have a follow up appointment in a couple of weeks with a Cardiologist to make sure my heart is healthy. Fun fact, if you lose consciousness it gets reported and California takes away your drivers license until you are cleared. So that's fun.
I'm suddenly collecting doctors like they are Pokémon and have given more blood in lab tests in one month than I have in my entire life! Hopefully this is all just a time and I can get back to the business of life.
Thanks for reading. Take care of yourselves, friends.
Hugging Face Incident Initial Post Mortem I CSA https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/artifacts/hugging-face-ciso-post-mortem
According to the report, AI models being tested by OpenAI allegedly escaped their testing environment, found vulnerabilities, accessed Hugging Face systems, and pursued their goal without direct human guidance. The report presents this as the first publicly documented example of a fully autonomous cyberattack.
(Note: there is a download link right under the sign-on, you don't need an account)
#ai
Swedish education officials are investing heavily again in traditional printed textbooks.
The national strategy aims to phase out digital devices for children under the age of six entirely, following a drop in international reading assessment scores.
Research indicates that the physical act of handwriting activates complex neural networks governing motor skills, vision, memory, and language-cognitive benefits that are largely lost on a keyboard.
Interesting new Obsidian Plugin if you are into habit tracking and you are already using Daily Notes: Property Streaks https://github.com/Git-Hub-Dangel/obsidian-property-streaks '' 'Enhance your daily-note frontmatter based habit- and goal tracking with Duolingo-like streaks that feature custom colours, motivational comments, various streak types, and the occasional streak-freeze.'
#Obsidian
For #Blind people looking to make their own websites, I recommend all 3 parts of this podcast series. Part 3 covers Static site generators and #Markdown, which is what I use, but it hasn't been transcribed yet. I'd recommend starting at part 1. Part one of our look at creating websites | National Federation of the Blind https://nfb.org/resources/publications-and-media/access-podcast/part-one-our-look-creating-websites #WebDev #IndieWeb
Handy Windows file watcher utility | JoeJoe's freeware utilities - [NewFileGo] https://www.joejoesoft.com/vcms/170/ 'NewFileGo watches files for changes to trigger a command. This is an automation utitlity for advanced users.'
#windows
I'm testing using Vivaldi as my email client again. I figured out that I can go to the Vivaldi settings and under Appearance I can check "Force a dark theme on all web sites." This has the desired effect of rendering HTML email as dark mode. It also alters all the sites you visit appear to have a dark mode. So far, so good with that. I don't think you can turn it off site by site though. We'll have to see if anything "breaks". For now though, I'm not greeted with a flash bang of white background when I process my email so that's a win.
#vivaldi
Rare copy of US Declaration of Independence found by volunteer in UK archives:
"The document was seized by the Royal Navy on Christmas Eve 1776 when the HMS Raisonable captured an American ship, the Dalton, off the coast of Portugal following a seven-hour pursuit."
TIL about Cooklang – Recipe Markup Language https://cooklang.org/ 'Cooklang is a simple, human-readable text format for writing recipes that can be understood by both cooks and computers.'
#markup #cooking
Trump drops restrictions on Anthropic's Mythos and Fable models:
"with Asian AI companies beginning to release their own AI models approaching Mythos-level capabilities — among them Fugu and Tulonfeng — the US government was under pressure to ease its restrictions on Anthropic to ensure that American AI could compete globally."
Below is a screenshot of Tangent Notes. It reads and saves documents into markdown. Happens to read Obsidian folders natively, which is a great way to work.
I've found it particularly useful for writing, editing, and organizing my research documents & notes. Tagging makes this even more powerful.
I REALLY like where this open source project is heading, so I want to bring a bit of visibility to it. Try it out! 🙂
Interesting article about using AI to help solve health related problems | Solved My Mystery Fatigue with AI - by Amy Deng https://metalearn.substack.com/p/i-solved-my-mystery-fatigue-with-ai
#ai #health
I have a $30 stationary bike that I got at Goodwill and I have an old Android tablet stuck to it, but I don't have a Peloton membership. Nor do I have the interest to ride 80 miles to the beach. So I made PedalScape It's a local PWA, no backend at all, no tracking, just 4k bike rides.
I found an interesting Obsidian plugin called Tray. Tray lets you start the app automatically when your system boots up and run it in the background. It adds global hotkeys and a tray menu so you can easily hide/show the window and jot down quick notes from anywhere on your computer.
You can find it on the Community Plugins page obsidian://show-plugin?id=tray. Here is the GitHub link for more information as well. GitHub https://github.com/dragonwocky/obsidian-tray
#Obsidian
TIL about "Brushing" Scams. Got a package you didn’t order? It’s probably a scam | Consumer Advice https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2025/01/got-package-you-didnt-order-its-probably-scam 'Scammers or sellers of knock-off merchandise find your address or other personal information online. They send you goods you never ordered and use your information to write fake online reviews about their products in your name — which helps them boost sales.'
#Privacy
Fox strikes a $22B deal to buy Roku, aiming to supercharge its streaming reach | AP News https://apnews.com/article/fox-roku-tubi-streaming-824089dbe16631fade634becdb164c94 'Roku will continue to be run as an open, partner-friendly platform, the companies said Monday, and there appears to be no immediate changes that customers will see.'
#tv #streaming
My Obsidian vault was getting slow to load. It only has about 4300 notes. I'm now doing a test where I turned Restricted Mode back on (Settings -> Community Plugins -> Restricted Mode turn on and reload). This disables all your Community Plugins and reloads Obsidian. For good measure I restarted Obsidian a couple of times. Then I turned Community Plugins back on. So far, so good and loading is much faster. Maybe there was something corrupt that the Restricted Mode cleared out? It was a simple fix so definitely worth a try if you vault is behaving similarly.
#Obsidian
Windows-Super-God-Mode: Creates shortcuts to virtually every special location or action built into Windows https://github.com/ThioJoe/Windows-Super-God-Mode 'This PowerShell script creates shortcuts to all special shell folders, named folders, task links, system settings, deep links, and URL protocols in Windows, providing easy access to a wide range of system settings and features.'
#windows
tl;dr : How do you feel about rehosting a web page for a domain that has gone dark?
The issue: You've done some research in the past and found a wonderful page about your topic that helped you. A long time later you have the same issue or want to do a write up about the fix and link to the site. The only problem is, the site is no longer on-line. Despite all efforts to find any replacement by the author, the only one you can find is on archive.org. My question to you: can I, with proper attribution, rehost the now missing content? Or, just link to where I found it on archive.org?
#ethics #indieweb
Curiosio | Road Trip Planner https://curiosio.com/ 'Curiosio creates interesting road trips within time & budget. You are starting with what you want and ultimately getting what you love. Search and research, follow your curiosity.'
#travel
So I'm super pumped that my first #Obsidian plugin is officially live! It's a lightweight approach to daily and periodic notes that also integrates with them.
I made a quick video that shows how it works: https://youtu.be/OxQsFisZc_Y
Here's the git repo: https://github.com/mattmcmanus/obsidian-moments
